March 16, 2001
Volume 3/ Number 8
Dear Colleague:
Disregarding El Salvador’s constitution and the immediate needs of its people, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has opted to supply abortifacient contraceptives rather than food and water to Salvadorian earthquake victims.
Steven W. Mosher
President
UNFPA Never at a Loss to Promote Population Control
On January 13, 2001, El Salvador was hit by an earthquake that left 844 people dead, 4,723 people injured and 108,226 houses destroyed. On February 13, El Salvador was hit by another earthquake. In a country of only 6 million people, over a million and a half people have been affected including 1159 lives lost. Some 70,000 are without drinking water.1
Yet, before the dust settled from the first earthquake, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) had already begun shipping their now infamous reproductive health kits. Leave it to UNFPA to offer a traumatized woman an IUD rather than water, food, and clothing for herself and her displaced family. It seems that the UNFPA never misses an opportunity to try to reduce the population of the Third World. These latest actions have been decried as “demographic imperialism” by Julia de Cardenal, president of a family advocacy group, Si a la Vida, and leader of an effort to aid the earthquake victims. Mrs. de Cardenal sees UNFPA’s offer of contraception (including the means for sterilization) in their hour of need as demeaning and as adding insult to injury.
Salvadorians love and respect life. Responding to the pressure of the developed world to accept abortion and the contraceptive mentality, El Salvador amended its constitution in 1999 to officially recognize that life begins at the moment of conception. Abortion is forbidden. Apparently, UNFPA disregards a nation’s laws when pushing its anti-natal agenda. These reproductive health kits do not contain the manual vacuum aspirators used for abortion as did the kits UNFPA supplied to the refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. However, they do contain, as one El Salvadorian doctor described, “a rainbow of abortifacient contraceptives” including the morning after pill.
UNFPA seems to have an agenda of promoting the acceptance of contraception, sterilization and abortion regardless of the laws and morals of the recipient nations. The United States should not be funding an organization that uses an earthquake as an opportunity to push abortifacient contraceptives and sterilization to people still standing in the rubble of an earthquake that has devastated their lives.
[1] USAID/OFDA: El Salvador 2, Fact Sheet #7 (FY 2001), 03/2/2001.
